Hoping to be the Google of business data search, ThoughtSpot has just announced the launch of its early access program for its ThoughtSpot Data Search Appliance.

ThoughtSpot promises business users the ability to access and analyze terabytes of business data with a Google-like ease of use. The appliance aims to eliminate the reporting pressure data-hungry business users put on IT admins. The solution also works to help IT manage data and infrastructure securely and in a centralized manner, which eliminates the proliferation of data copies on users' desktops.

"We see a huge opportunity in the BI market for a product that can bring the power of search to business data. Here at ThoughtSpot, we have spent the past 18 months building an A-plus team to create something that will genuinely be a game-changer in the world of BI," said ThoughtSpot co-founders Ajeet Singh and Amit Prakash. "We are thrilled to open up early access to more customers today. The level of interest and excitement we've seen so far is a validation of our belief that enterprise customers want a Google-like interaction with their data and are tired of traditional, complicated BI tools."

Transforming Big Data Search

Google has transformed the way the world searches for public data on the Web. Facebook and LinkedIn have changed how we search through social data. As ThoughtSpot’s co-founders see it, the business data world is still stuck in the past, requiring constant time and attention from IT to create reports using business intelligence tools that were built 10 to 20 years ago.

ThoughtSpot is building what company co-founders consider disruptive technology from the ground up to change the game in business data access, analysis and visualization. ThoughtSpot Data Search Appliance promises consumer-class user experience with enterprise-class security, scalability, and manageability. Big vendors such as SAP and IBM have talked about BI products that provide search-based experiences to enterprise users, but ThoughtSpot boldly declared it is actually delivering on this promise to reinvent how BI is done.

We caught up with Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, to get his take on the new search tech. He told us ThoughtSpot is making a big promise.

“Without being able to see and test the product it's impossible to assess how much the reality lives up to the claim. However, if the company can deliver on its promise it would be impressive,” Sterling said. “As more and more data are generated and have to be analyzed, something like this would be extremely useful for enterprises.”

VCs Betting on Data Search

Venture capitalists are buying into the promise. ThoughtSpot has raised $10.7 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and angel investors Frank Slootman (president and CEO of ServiceNow and ex-CEO of Data Domain), Lane Bess (COO of ZScaler and ex-CEO of Palo Alto Networks), Steve Sommer (CMO of Splunk), and Sudheesh Nair (VP WW sales of Nutanix). ThoughtSpot is also advised by a team of data analytics experts from companies such as Facebook, Informatica, and Netezza/IBM.

"There is a huge opportunity to consumerize business data access by replacing BI tools from decades ago with an intuitive, web-search like experience," said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Singh, Prakash, Ravi Mhatre, Arif Janmohamed, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Frank Slootman, a board observer, make up the board of directors.

The founding team has a strong track record of building revolutionary companies and technologies. Singh is a second-time entrepreneur who previously co-founded Nutanix, one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology companies of the last decade that was recently valued at $1 billion. Prakash was a founding engineer of Microsoft's Bing team, then spent five years leading technical teams in Google's AdSense Analytics group. Other co-founders include technical leaders who have made significant contributions to technology such as Google's Search Index, Google's Project Borg, Google's Ads Database, Microsoft's SQL Server, and Oracle's BI-in-the-cloud.